Vanished Colonial Town Yields Baroque Surprise
By JOHN HARTSOCK, Special to the New York Times
Published: February 05, 1989
On a cold winter day the fields betray little evidence of the grand scheme. But just beyond the turning edge of the plowshare lies the evidence of a vanished city believed to be the first elaborately designed urban center in North America.
The town was St. Mary's City, Maryland's first settlement and first capital, and archeologists now say that its intricate blueprint was designed to help create a new society in the wilderness.
''Maryland's first city was radically different from what we had thought,'' Henry Miller, the state's chief archeologist at the site, said recently. ''What we've got here is a very elaborate plan being laid out in a time period when Maryland is still raw frontier.''
For seven years Mr. Miller has directed a team of archeologists digging and sifting to map St. Mary's City. Their work, reported in the current issue of Historical Archeology, disclosed that the town's planner had utilized Italian baroque principals characterized by precise measurements and tidy geometric and symmetrical arrangements.
It has not been determined who designed the town, but it is likely, Mr. Miller said, that Jerome White, an Englishman who had lived in Italy, had a hand in it when he was surveyor general of the Maryland colony in the 1660's. Unique Place in America
The sophisticated design is significant, Mr. Miller said, because historians had long assumed that like most frontier towns, St. Mary's City developed haphazardly or was laid out in a simple grid. While that was probably true when the town was founded in 1634, the irregularity gave way to a carefully laid-out plan in the 1660's.
''Using the baroque concept makes this a very unique place in America during this period of time,'' Mr. Miller said, adding that only three other North American cities are designed on baroque principles: Annapolis, Md., laid out from 1695 to 1697; Williamsburg, Va., designed in 1699, and Washington, D.C., designed in 1791.
St. Mary's City was always a small town. Even in its heyday it probably had no more than 300 to 400 residents on its 1,200 acres, Mr. Miller said. The town never developed as a commercial center and slowly died after Annapolis became the capital in 1695. By the 1820's no trace of it remained. Excavating Some Surprises
Only in 1981 did Maryland begin excavating the town in earnest. By 1985 most of the major archeological sites - those of the State House, the town square, the Roman Catholic church, the school and the prison - had been identified.
While doing routine archeological reconstruction in September 1985, Mr. Miller measured the distance from the State House site to the church's. To his surprise, he found that the door-to- distance door was exactly half a mile.
In ensuing months, evidence of a grand town plan emerged. Both the church and the State House were 1,400 feet from the center of the town square. And when the town's main buildings were connected by lines, an unusual picture emerged of two outspread, triangular wings. The State House was at the end of one wing, the church at the end of the other wing. The town square connecting the wings measured 125 feet on each side.
Placing important buildings on geographically prominent locations disclosed another clue. The State House sat on a promontory near the St. Mary's River, providing a landmark for ships. The church was on the highest point of land in the town and could have been the first building a traveler saw when he entered the capital on the main road. Symbolism in Design
Baroque design was generally intended to be symbolic. In St. Mary's City, Mr. Miller said, it would have helped to establish the authority of the Lords Baltimore, rulers of Maryland, and their capital at a time when there were few other settlements in the colony.
''It served as a real statement: this is the capital of Maryland,'' Mr. Miller said.
In addition, he said, the positioning of the seat of government and the main church at opposite ends of town, may have symbolized the separation of church and state at a time when religion and government were tightly bound in most of Europe, including England.
Maryland was founded by Cecil Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore, a Roman Catholic, in part as a refuge for persecuted English Catholics. But he welcomed all faiths, and his tolerance was codified by the Maryland Legislature in 1649 when it passed the Act of Religious Toleration, the first such law in North America.
Paradoxically, it was a religious dispute that doomed St. Mary's City. In 1689 Protestant colonists rose up against the Lords Baltimore and took control of the State House. They petitioned William III to appoint a royal governor, and the King did so, removing the colony from the lords' control and transferring the capital to Annapolis.
Much remains to be done in piecing a more detailed picture of St. Mary's City. A particularly intriguing question, Mr. Miller said, is the reason for the outstretched-wing design.
The research of the last seven years ''opens up a lot of opportunities,'' he said, ''but it doesn't provide the final answers.''